Laura Calder on the art of feeding friends

Laura Calder is a nomad. The cookbook author and television host has lived everywhere from France and Germany to London and California, constantly wary of unpacking her bags.

“A friend once said to me, ‘Laura, you’re driftwood,’ and I was so upset. I thought about it, and I don’t want to be driftwood. At heart, I want a house full of stuff, I want big cushions and antiques and an old house that’s been there for 400 years, that kind of permanence. But I haven’t had it yet,” Calder says over a glass of white wine in a downtown Toronto pub. “I have roots, sure. I have two great brothers, my parents are together, I have lots of friends. I have all this solidity, so I don’t know why I should be so volatile.”

Even a recent stint in Toronto hasn’t taken, with Calder now planning a move to Montreal, where she first cooked dishes like spicy chicken with avocado sauce as a McGill student some 20 years ago. “I’m not there yet,” she cautions. “You make these proclamations and then life changes on you. God knows, I could be living in Berlin this time next year.”

Calder’s suitcase-ready lifestyle is all the more noteworthy considering the title of her latest book is Dinner Chez Moi. But she is also the first to concede that lacking your own home shouldn’t stop you from preparing and sharing meals with the people you love. Indeed, years of travel and impermanence provided the inspiration for her latest book.

“When I was writing this, it felt like I was tossing around at sea. And then a recipe came along like a life raft, and I threw my body on that chicken pot pie or roast beef dinner,” says the host of Food Network’s French Food at Home, who also co-stars in the upcoming series Recipe to Riches, an American Idol for home cooks. “[Chez Moi] is more a book on, ‘Oh God, my life is in pieces, give me a steak and mashed potatoes.’ “

The new book, subtitled The Fine Art of Feeding Friends, is aptly dedicated to John Evans, a Vancouver Island-based septuagenarian who introduced Calder to her new “family” — a tight-knit group of Toronto seniors who invited Calder to join their weekly pub nights.

“I met John by chance at a dinner party in Vancouver, and he asked how I liked Toronto, and I just blurted out, ‘I hate it! It’s ugly and I have no friends!’ He said, ‘Well, you better meet mine.’ And so they’ve all got 30 or 40 years on me, but you’ve never met a group of more irreverent, funny people,” says Calder, just a few moments before members of that same “family” begin trickling into the pub for a celebratory meal.

Written more like a “why to” than a traditional “how to” cookbook, Chez Moi is Calder’s most autobiographical work yet, filled with thoughtful digressions and confessional anecdotes (plus a smattering of hand-drawn illustrations).

“This one is about exposing yourself: If you’ve lived it, put it in there,” the New Brunswick native says. “I can read my life between the lines.”

Instead of such fanciful recipes from Calder’s earlier books involving “thyme sticks dipped in olive oil,” Chez Moi focuses on the importance of preparing simple food for hungry people: corn soup with coriander, sea bass on fennel, glazed lemon loaf and “The Lovely Lady Pamela’s Lobster Dip,” one of the many recipes shared by members of her pub family.

“If you read the book from beginning to end, you start off and it’s a bit chaotic. It’s about not knowing where you are and you’re a little bit lost,” says Calder as she prepares to get back into the kitchen to prepare tonight’s menu (for the record: salad with caramelized figs, beef stew and an apple galette).

“But by the end of it, you reach a conclusion of why it actually matters to eat with people, and that’s the subconscious realization that came through the process of writing the book,” she adds. “I like that real life influenced it — it’s not attached to a TV show. It came from life, and I hope it shows.”